Operation Mockingbird on steroids
http://www.fair.org/activism/osi-propaganda.html Pentagon Propaganda Plan Is Undemocratic, Possibly Illegal
February 19, 2002
The New York Times reported today that the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Influence is “developing plans to provide news items, possibly even false ones, to foreign media organizations” in an effort “to influence public sentiment and policy makers in both friendly and unfriendly countries.”
The OSI was created shortly after September 11 to publicize the U.S. government’s perspective in Islamic countries and to generate support for the U.S.’s “war on terror.” This latest announcement raises grave concerns that far from being an honest effort to explain U.S. policy, the OSI may be a profoundly undemocratic program devoted to spreading disinformation and misleading the public, both at home and abroad. At the same time, involving reporters in Pentagon disinformation puts the lives of working journalists at risk. .......
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According to the New York Times, “one of the military units assigned to carry out the policies of the Office of Strategic Influence” is the U.S. Army’s Psychological Operations Command (PSYOPS). The Times doesn’t mention, however, that PSYOPS has been accused of operating domestically as recently as the Kosovo war.
In February 2000, reports in Dutch and French newspapers revealed that several officers from the 4th PSYOPS Group had worked in the news division at CNN's Atlanta headquarters as part of an “internship” program starting in the final days of the Kosovo War. Coverage of this disturbing story was scarce (see FAIR’s “Why Were Government Propaganda Experts Working on News at CNN? <
http://www.fair.org/activism/cnn-psyops.html >” 3/27/00), but after FAIR issued an Action Alert on the story, CNN stated that it had already terminated the program and acknowledged that it was “inappropriate.”
Even if the PSYOPS officers working in the newsroom did not directly influence news reporting, the question remains of whether CNN may have allowed the military to conduct an intelligence-gathering mission against the network itself. The idea isn’t far-fetched-- according to Intelligence Newsletter (2/17/00), a rear admiral from the Special Operations Command told a PSYOPS conference that the military needed to find ways to "gain control" over commercial news satellites to help bring down an "informational cone of silence" over regions where special operations were taking place. One of CNN’s PSYOPS “interns” worked in the network’s satellite division. (During the Afghanistan war the Pentagon found a very direct way to “gain control”-- it simply bought up all commercial satellite images of Afghanistan, in order to prevent media from accessing them.)
It’s worth noting that the 4th PSYOPS group is the same group that staffed the National Security Council's now notorious Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), which planted stories in the U.S. media supporting the Reagan Administration's Central America policies during the 1980s. Described by a senior U.S. official as a "vast psychological warfare operation of the kind the military conducts to influence a population in enemy territory" (Miami Herald, 7/19/87), the OPD was shut down after the Iran-Contra investigations, but not before influencing coverage in major outlets including the Wall Street Journal, New York Times and Washington Post (Extra!, 9-10/01).
The OPD may be gone, but the Bush administration’s recent recess appointment of former OPD head Otto Reich as assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs is not reassuring. It suggests, at best, a troubling indifference to Reich’s role in orchestrating the OPD’s deception of the American people.
Indeed, as the Federation of American Scientists points out, “the Bush Administration’s insistent efforts to expand the scope of official secrecy have now been widely noted as a defining characteristic of the Bush presidency” (Secrecy News, 2/18/02). The administration’s refusal to disclose Enron-related information to the General Accounting Office is perhaps the most publicized of these efforts; another is Attorney General John Ashcroft’s October 12 memo urging federal agencies to resist Freedom Of Information Act requests. ......
Kissing up to KissingerThe reporters who loved Henry and what they said.
By Jack Shafer
Posted Monday, Oct. 4, 2004, at 5:23 PM PT
Henry Kissinger
During his years as national security adviser and secretary of state, Henry Kissinger wooed the Washington press corps with the flowers and chocolate of flattery and access. As Walter Isaacson writes in his 1992 biography, Kissinger, opinion columnists and the reporters who covered the State Department or the White House grew especially captivated by his charms.
Journalists took priority over matters of state for Kissinger, or at least that's how it looked to his colleagues. CIA Director Richard Helms tells Isaacson of the time Kissinger made him wait as he sorted though his message slips, placed reporters' messages at the top of the pile, and returned their calls. Kissinger speechwriter John Andrews remembers that when they were working on a speech together and a high-status columnist like Joseph Kraft or Joseph Alsop telephoned, Kissinger would pause their labors "and do an incredible snow job with me listening in. He'd pour syrup all over the guy." John Ehrlichman tells Isaacson a similar story about Kissinger stroking reporters over the phone. "I could not help hearing Henry's blandishments and his self-congratulation," Ehrlichman says.
....
The most devoted members of the Kissinger press cult, based on the phone transcripts, were CBS News Chief Diplomatic Correspondent Marvin Kalb, former New York Times Washington editor and columnist James "Scotty" Reston, and Time magazine's Hugh Sidey. But other figures tossed kisses to Kissinger from afar, including political columnist Stewart Alsop, former Los Angeles Times Publisher Otis Chandler, William Randolph Hearst Jr., and former Washington Star owner—and soon to be ex-Riggs Bank proprietor—Joseph L. Albritton.
Kalb sends an FTD-sized bouquet down the line to Kissinger on the evening of Sept. 22, 1973, the day he became secretary of state.
... I did wish you well from the bottom of my heart, the wisdom and the grace and the tolerance that are going to be so necessary to success because I very much have the feeling in the long sweep of history perhaps that your tenure is going to prove to be larger than simply something that has to do with diplomacy. There's a human and a psychological component here which has to be vindicated in a major way and I feel that very strongly and I wish you towering good luck.
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